


Red Strings

by Fullmetalruby



Category: Naruto
Genre: Prompt Fill
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-07
Updated: 2016-10-07
Packaged: 2018-08-19 23:55:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8229112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fullmetalruby/pseuds/Fullmetalruby
Summary: Prompt: In a world where a fully matured Sharingan can see the Red Strings of Fate, how far might one person go to protect the person that they were born to love?"Madara left the river one day and promised himself he would never look fondly on Hashirama again. And for the first time, his vision spun red."





	

Madara was young when his mother died, young enough that he could barely even remember what she looked like. He remembered the way she stroked his hair when he had a bad dream, and how she would sit him down in front of a mirror and say _See Madara, we have the same smile!_ to their reflections.

But Madara and his brothers were too small to take care of themselves, and their father was too absent to care for five sons. So The five boys were entrusted to the oldest bag of bones in the entire clan, Elder Kinoue.

Though doubtful of her child-rearing abilities at first, Madara swiftly decided she was his favorite elder. She was, like everyone in the clan, _technically_ related to him, but the still-red tips of her silver hair came from a definite lack of Uchiha blood. Her thin hands had too many callouses to count and a delicate frame full of scars from a lifetime of fighting. Like every Uchiha, she had been a shinobi once (Madara had only questioned her ability to raise children, not her ability to kill men. He had heard enough stories about Kinoue Matsuoka to know better).

She could cook a sight better than most any other shinobi in the clan. Kinoue could probably make three-day-old fish and stinging nettles appetizing given the chance (and she actually had done it once. Madara ate every last bite and _loved_ it). She had an acid wit and a twisted mind, but she managed to raise Madara and Izuna well enough.

But Madara’s favorite thing about growing up with Kinoue were the stories she told. Stories about shape-changers who advised against trust because it made you vulnerable, and about beautiful daimyos’ daughters who didn't wait around for clumsy samurai to come save them. The tale of Asu and Inda, the brothers who became enemies over their father’s choice of heir and the underlying message of _don’t be stupid, don’t follow in their footsteps, don’t fall prey to jealousy_.

The best of all was of the sharingan and about how the Uchiha used to use it to see the bonds between people. How even today, if you looked hard enough, a fully matured sharingan could show the red string of fate that connected a person to the other half of their soul. Madara and Izuna would listen raptly when Kinoue spoke of her own soulmate, who she'd lost decades ago in battle against the Senju. Call Madara a closet romantic all you want, he would never deny it. Besides, Kinoue would smile like never before when speaking of her lover, who wasn't an Uchiha but was welcomed by the clan all the same and mourned the same when death came for them.

Izuna said he couldn’t wait until he could see his red thread and follow it back to the person who would make him complete. Kenta, Koushi, and Shinya were about as enchanted as two newborns and a toddler could be.

 _“_ In due time,” Kinoue would tell them with a melancholic twinkle in her grey eyes, “you will see in due time.”

* * *

 

Madara is only a little bit older when Kenta and Koushi die.

In all honesty, it wasn’t unexpected. Mother had been ill while she was pregnant with them, and they were born early. They had always been small and sickly, and the sickness that ravaged the entire clan took too much of a toll on them. But no matter how likely their deaths had been, it didn’t make them hurt any less.

Shinya was still too young to ever remember his younger brothers as anything more than names without faces, but for Izuna and Madara it was a different story.

Izuna had cared for the twins like they were the most precious things in the world to him (and if you had asked him, they were). He had done his six-year-old best to keep them inside when the sickness started so as to keep them uninfected, and when that failed he aided Kinoue in her attempts to nurse them back to health. When the twins passed in the middle of the night, he had been asleep sitting up next to them. He woke when they stopped breathing- in tandem, as everything they did was.

Madara took the whole thing rather a lot better than Izuna did. After all, he was an eight-year old Uchiha. He had seen battle, seen war, seen death. _Caused_ death. (However much he would deny it, these deaths hit too close to home. But he cried only once, when he and Kinoue shared their tears for the first and only time)

* * *

 

Madara is ten when he meets Hashirama. Madara is small and weedy and his voice is high and it peeves him that he’s still a child in this way. On the other hand, Hashirama is already halfway through a growth spurt and the wonders of his personality are infinitely offset by the absolute insult of his bowl cut.

But for all that his hair hurts to look at, he and Madara share a dream. They have a vision of a sprawling city where there is no war, and where two ten year olds don’t have to pretend to hate each other when they face off on the battlefield. They sit together on the banks of the Naka River, and decide that they will build their city here.

And for all they talk of a city full of happy families and smiling faces, they speak of other things too. Madara talks about the time when he knocked a hornet’s nest out of a tree while training and Izuna couldn’t stop laughing long enough to get help. In turn, Hashirama complains about Tobirama’s _experiments_ and the how once he watched Tobirama bring a cat back to life.

Madara told him that it was impossible to bring back the dead.

They never say their family names but they figure each other out anyways. Despite how much Madara enjoyed Hashirama’s company, no matter how good of a friend he was, a Senju and an Uchiha simply couldn’t be friends.

Madara left the river one day and promised himself he would never look fondly on Hashirama again. And for the first time, his vision spun red.

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt is from sumigakure.tumblr.com . Super cool page, 10000% would recommend checking it out.


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